See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/273017116 Global Tribe: Technology, Spirituality and Psytrance Book · November 2012 CITATIONS READS 27 2,938 1 author: Graham Peter St John Université de Fribourg 60 PUBLICATIONS 534 CITATIONS SEE PROFILE Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects: DMT in Culture, Religion and History View project Global Psyculture View project All content following this page was uploaded by Graham Peter St John on 22 March 2016. The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file. Global Tribe Technology, Spirituality and Psytrance Graham St John Published by Equinox Publishing Ltd. UK: Unit S3, Kelham House, 3 Lancaster Street, Sheffield, S3 8AF USA: ISD, 70 Enterprise Drive, Bristol, CT 06010 www.equinoxpub.com First published 2012 © Graham St John 2012 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. ISBN 978-1-84553-955-9 (hardback) 978-1-84553-956-6 (paperback) British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data St. John, Graham, 1968- Global tribe : technology, spirituality and psytrance / Graham St John. p. cm.—(Studies in popular music) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-84553-955-9 (hardcover)—ISBN 978-1-84553-956-6 (pbk.) 1. Trance (Underground dance music)—Social aspects. 2. Trance (Underground dance music)—History and criticism. I. Title. ML3918.U53S7 2012 781.648—dc23 2012007643 Typeset by S.J.I. Services, New Delhi Printed and bound by Lightning Source UK Ltd., Milton Keynes Contents Acknowledgements vii 1 Transnational psyculture 1 2 Experience, the Orient and Goatrance 18 3 #e vibe at the end of the world 72 4 Spiritual technology: transition and its prosthetics 101 5 Psychedelic festivals, visionary arts and cosmic events 152 6 Freak out: the trance carnival 199 7 Psyculture in Israel and Australia 233 8 Performing risk and the arts of consciousness 264 9 Riot of passage: liminal culture and the logics of sacrifice 291 10 Nothing lasts 329 Notes 337 Bibliography, discography and filmography 350 Index 377 1 Transnational psyculture !ey occupy the Temple in the thousands. At the dusk of a scorching day, in outfits with vivid fractal designs, alien insignia, C symbols and geometric mandala patterns, they arrive in cohorts who’ve journeyed from a multitude of national embarkation points. With utility-belts slinked at the waist and dreadlocks knotted back, imprinted with futuristic glyphs, etched in tribal tattoos and marked by facial piercings, they come bearing gifts of specially prepared decoctions, meads, herbal mixes, ganja cakes, crystal powders, beer and other intoxicants, along with fruits and energy supplements they will share among friends and strangers encountered through the night, and into the day. Entering this vast hexagonal covered arena, the noise of the surrounding festival recedes as occupants are enveloped in “3D sound” controlled from a stage upon which rests a stellated dodecahedron portal within which scheduled DJs perform the hypnotic bass and rhythm patterns of electronic trance music dictating a compulsion on the part of those present to become activated by moves. And as the natural light fades, the Temple is enlivened with psychotropic projections, morphing geometric laser patterns and blacklights triggering ultraviolet reactive designs and illuminating the awestruck appearances of Temple dancers who will carve shapes into the night. At one side of this structure, groups huddle under luminescent Day of the Triffids-like installations crafted from recycled material, and all around the edges the enthused are lost to engrossing acrobatic displays, spinning fire staff and twirling LED poi with stunning light-trail effects. Into the early hours of the morning, the intensity of furious-paced “darkpsy” transits towards uplifting and melodic sounds as the Sun clears the horizon and begins its journey over the sky’s proscenium arch. It’s mid-summer in Portugal, at the tail end of August 2010, and I’m on one of the most expansive and impressive outdoor dance floors on the planet. !e Dance Temple is integral to the biennial Boom Festival held in central-eastern Portugal near the protected area Parque do Tejo Internacional and the village 2 GLOBAL TRIBE of Idanha-a-Nova. An eight-day event, Boom is the premiere production in world psychedelic trance (psytrance) and visionary arts culture, with its Temple attracting near 25,000 people holding passports from approximately seventy countries.1 If there’s a global centre of psyculture, this is it. Inside the Dance Temple, I’m immersed in a soundbath of languages and caught in a blizzard of sensory impressions. Up on stage, an artist is DJing from a laptop and orchestrating a sonic broadside incorporating hypnotic melody lines around persistent and seductive bass-lines. Frequencies amplified through the sound system enervate my whole being. Time passes, and I too pass outside of normal time. And within this prolonged now, the optical grows rhythmic and sounds become visible. !e national colour-codes and iconography of Japan, Israel, Sweden, Brazil and Australia, to name a few, blend with expatriate gestures, not dissimilar to those performed by forebears in Goa, India, the birthplace of Goatrance, the formative dance movement from which psytrance and its various subgenres grew. !ere’s possibly 10,000 people on and around this dance floor at this moment, a vast congregation of fleshy gesticulations, its habitués performing the international hand and foot signals of trance. I feel like I’ve landed among a community in exile. !ere’s multiple personal, lifestyle and cultural concerns this community’s inhabitants have sought exodus from, and at this moment they’re communi- cating their desires in the expressive mode of dance. And, as I slide into the groove, I feel like I’ve come home. As I turn about, I’m face-whipped by a woman with long black dreadlocks. Commanding a wicked stomp, she’s beside herself. Nearby, a Japanese freak in his early thirties stands astride jabbing at unseen soap bubbles up ahead. He’s joined by compatriots in carnage alive on the pulse. An Italian girl in fairy wings swivels gracefully four-stepping in perfect unison with the beat. A German freak, who I recognize by his unyielding grin, is cutting it up inside his own personal smoke cloud. Others clown around, hug their partners in the sublime, prepare a chillum, maintaining form amidst the mayhem. All about me, transnational beat freaks ride the 16th-note loop of psychedelic trance, compelled by its progression, acting as if everything depends on its maintenance, as if a faltering move will cause a collapse in the rhythm and a diminution of the vibe. And as we pass outside of ourselves, it seems to me that everyone has fallen into the slot, that zone which everybody knows though few can articulate – that moment in which nothing remains the same. “!is is it”. Grinning under bass pressure, my crazy Russian neighbour shouts something barely intelligible, something about the “mothership” we’ve boarded. Oscillating between self-dissolution and spectacular displays, its passengers are blissful abductees. Many producers have collaborated to steer our ship through the night. In transit, time’s lost and the world is gained. Eventually, I snake my way across this incredible synesthetic stomping ground, idling to absorb kangaroo stilt performers jumping over gales of laughter. TRANSNATIONAL PSYCULTURE 3 Leaving this dance floor is like finding the best route out of a metropolis. Floating on a wave of exhilaration and the aromas of chai, charas and changa, eventually I emerge out of the Temple and disappear into the wider festival. It was my third time at Boom, a world barometer on the state of psychedelic trance music and culture: psyculture. Even though it no longer identifies itself as a “psytrance” festival, this music dominates the schedule of its main venue (the Dance Temple). My attendance had been driven by a desire to participate in and observe trends in psytrance and the wider visionary arts culture, a research project that grew from my involvement in this scene since the mid-1990s in Melbourne, Australia. By 2010, this project had taken me to more than a dozen countries, and countless events, festivals and after- parties. Psytrance is a movement rooted in the live music scene of the 1970s flourishing in the former Portuguese colony of Goa, India, which had been overtaken by a seasonal DJ-led electronic music scene in the 1980s. Goa had attracted international travellers, artists and spiritual seekers since the 1960s, becoming an exotic outland of experimentation for musicians and expatriates in subsequent decades. It was the birthplace and proving grounds of a mutant dance music culture, which, by the mid-1990s, became marketed as Goa Trance (or Goatrance as it is denoted in this book). Following aesthetic shifts associated with analog, digital and virtual music technologies along with transitions in taste and demand, Goatrance later developed as psychedelic trance or psytrance, which splintered into numerous subgenres by the early 2000s. While these include progressive psychedelic (progpsy or progressive psy), darkpsy (dark psychedelic trance), full-on, psybreaks and suomisaundi (Finnish trance), a close connection is maintained with psychedelic ambient (sometimes referred to as “psybient”) dub and with a fusional aesthetic sometimes referred to as “ethnodelic”, all signs, sounds and scenes of a voracious “meta-genre” (Lindop 2010) providing the soundtracks and dancescapes for a diverse and contested cultural, or psycultural, movement.